What unites all these works is a severe absence of sentiment--and even of inner motion. A remarkable stillness suffuses the prose in each; a stillness beyond pain, fear or agitation. It is as though, in each case, the writer feels herself standing at the end of history--eyes dry, sentences cold and pure--staring hard, without longing or fantasy or regret, into the is-ness of what is.
-Vivian Gornick, “Reading in an Age of Uncertainty”